EAC Thesis Award Juror Profile: Matthew Hayes

Matthew Hayes is an Associate Professor at St. Thomas University and has been with the department of sociology since 2009. His PhD dissertation (York University 2008) looked at how certain ideas and values helped shape the technical organization of the economy in the 20th century, particularly through macroeconomics.

A few weeks after his dissertation defense, the stock market collapsed, and the so-called ‘Great Recession’ began. During this time, he became increasingly interested in how the relatively secure middle class in North America was being exposed to new and deeper forms of financial stress, and how cultural values and objective economic conditions increasingly diverged on issues such as labour, economic security, and urban and household forms. He is currently working on connecting this ethnographic work to broader theoretical reflections on the geographies of inequality in an individualist, market-oriented, post-welfare state world.